The thing is, although it sort of sounds like nonsense, it does actually make total sense.A rare talent.Art by Steve Dillon

On John:

Is John Smith 2000AD’s
best-kept secret? He’s produced work elsewhere for other publishers, but not to
the same standard of his 2000AD output. Perhaps his name helps him keep a low
profile.

Smith's muse?
Art by Ashley Wood

Smith is known for
working at his own pace. Clearly not at all short of ideas, it can take time
for individual ideas to cohere into actual stories, and for him to find the
right hole to slot his colourful characters into.

Indigo Prime (which first appeared under the soubriquet ‘Void Indigo’ in a Future
Shock) is a case in point. Smith had the idea for an organisation comprising
teams of deceased humans who would fix problems behind the scenes of reality in
various ways. It’s a marvellous excuse to set up vast arrays of characters from
across time and space with delightful names and bizarre appearances, who actually
have to be weird to do their job properly. And he’s got the imagination to make
those characters work. Sadly, finding the right stories to tell with this
delicious set up has not proven so easy, meaning we’ve had just 12 Indigo Prime
tales told in the last 20 years…

The newly decesaed are introduced to Indigo Prime.
Art by Chris Weston

Some of these were
downright bizarre – Soft Bodies, I’m looking at you** - some were pretty much
silly (the Starsky and Hutch episode), but when it works you get Killing Time, one of my all time
favourite 2000AD stories. And what you always get is some delicious character
design, combining grit with wit; rough-edged people with the ultra-refined.
This tends to bring out the best in imaginative artists such as Chris Weston,
Edmund Bagwell and Lee Carter, who are absolutely keen to embrace the outré.

Even more of a case in
point is New Statesmen, produced very
early in Smith’s career for ‘grown-up’ comic Crisis. In an unfair way, it’s
easy to say New Statesmen was a naked
attempt to re-do / outdo Watchmen. In
its defence, it ended up one of the very best attempts in comics to take on Watchmen, since it is actually about
imagining a society where super-powered beings are tools of the government and
celebrities in a real-world sense, and isn’t about exposing childish understandings
of human psychology and glorifying in ultra-violence (not really what Watchmen itself was doing, but
definitely what a lot of post-Watchmen
superhero comics did). Less in its defence, New
Statesmen suffers from too many narrative jumps that leave the reader
uncertain of just what the heck is going on and why a lot of the time.***

And this leads into another
thing I think Smith is known for: creating stories that can be confusing. Sometimes
this is fair, especially in his earlier work, but 2000 AD is the kind of comic
that expects its readers to try a bit harder, and good for it. The fact remains
that Smith has a tendency to pepper his expository captions and dialogue with
made-up slang. This makes the captions more interesting, but often to the
detriment of explaining the plot. I’ve certainly had to re-read certain
episodes a few times in order to understand the story.

They're called soft bodies for a reason...
Art by Will Simpson

Smith doesn’t like to
hold a reader’s hand. He’ll jump points of view, leap through space and time,
and expects the readers to keep up. When paired with ethereal artists such as
Simon Harrison (on Revere), this
can make the narrative appear to be much more elliptical than it actually is.
Similarly, when he produces such imposing (and winning) characters as Devlin
Waugh or Tyranny Rex, the force of their personalities has a tendency to
overwhelm the storyline. You expect the story to be about these characters,
when often they are stumbling through a narrative along with the reader, making
it harder for us to get an handle on what is going on.

I’ve mentioned it
already, but the Tyranny Rex outing Soft Bodies, one of Smith’s earliest in
the Prog, was deliberately all over the place as a narrative. It kind of set a
tone that he’s not entirely escaped from. The apotheosis of this style of
writing was Danzig’s Inferno – a
two-part oddity drawn by Sean Phillips that remains, for me, the single most
impenetrable work published by Tharg.

One hilarious upshot
is the sad truth that when Firekind
ran in the Prog with an episode missing, a lot of readers didn’t notice and
just thought. “H’mm, there’s been a bit of a jump here. Oh well, that’s Smith
for you.” Having the missing episode re-inserted helps, but in fact this story
is strong enough that it’s not vital. Many others have pointed this out before:
if you liked James Cameron’s Avatar but wished it had a proper grown-up plot
instead of a string of clichés, then read Firekind.

Larsen learns the truth in Firekind.
Art by Paul Marshall

In fact, if I’m making
any kind of point here, it’s that you should go back and re-read some John
Smith comics right now! You’re sure to get something out of it you didn’t the
first (few) times.

But really, Smith is
perfectly capable of crafting some straight down the line action stories – A Love like Blood; Pussyfoot 5; Slaughterbowl;
Leatherjack (although this last has
themes and meta-narratives coming out of every orifice).

A Love Like Blood: a vampire falls for a werewolf. With blood and guts instead of moping.
Art by Frazer Irving

Even most of Revere,
on the surface something of a fever dream, is at heart a pretty straight action
tale about a reckless youth who has run-ins with the law while trying to pursue
a girl. He gets caught up in some mystical slightly drug-hazed shenanigans, but
these scenes are more of a pause in the action than anything else.

Revere: a violent, stabby moment.
Art by Simon Harrison

Revere: a peaceful, romantic moment.
Art by Simon Harrison

Devlin Waugh, on the whole, is pretty straight (if you’ll pardon the pun) action
comics storytelling, too. Swimming in
Blood, the first tale, felt to me like a pretty brash Silence of the Lambs
riff, with a bit of Aliens thrown in – just held together by a startlingly
exciting main character.

When Devlin met Dredd.
Art by Sean Phillips

He’s generally described as Noel Coward’s head (and
brain) on Arnold Schwarzenegger’s body. And then by the second story, he’s a
vampire as well. Later Waugh stories have focussed more on said character’s
personality, but there’s usually a rollicking yarn going on around him,
especially in the globe-trotting Herod
epic.

Bon mots flow from Waugh's tongue.
Art by Colin MacNeil

I would say that in
general that John Smith’s work has become tighter with age/experience. The
scripts flow more easily, the neologisms have faded, but the challenging ideas
remain. I’d kind of love him to re-do New
Statesmen now that he’s a more mature writer just to see what it was really
all about!

Underneath it all is
horror. I think some editors have gone on record as saying that Smith is
fundamentally a horror writer – something I’d take to be an enormous compliment
since he’s written very few straight-down-the-line horror stories. But it is
true that those stories rank amongst his very best – Cinnabar, Killing Time, his
two ‘Tales from Beyond Science’***
and, most recently, Cradlegrave. Each
is a work of full on body horror, so be warned! If you don’t like lashings of
gore with your chills, stay away from John Smith when he’s in unrestrained
horror mode.

Cradlegrave: the horror comes in what you don't see...
only to be turned up to 11 by the horror you eventually DO see.
Art by Edmund Bagwell

Of course, there are
horror elements to an awful lot of his work, not least in his predilection for
villains that like to indulge in obscene acts and unseen tortures.

Meet (one of) the bad guys from Leatherjack
Art by Paul Marshall

You don't have to be neatly coiffured, elegantly dressed and a bit camp to be a John Smith villain...
but it helps. Art (and perhaps some of the design responsibility) by Paul Marshall.

And I think it’s fair
to say that much of his Dredd output involves a lot of gore, and not just from
gunshot wounds as in a typical Wagner or Rennie episode.

The Jigsaw Murderer.
Art by Xuasus

Life in Mega City 1 isn't all headbutting eggs into a bowl.
Art by John Hicklenton

The great thing about
Smith is that you just never know what you’re going to get from him. He’s been
a 2000 AD mainstay for so long, but remains unpredictable. You might get a new
hit of Indigo Prime, Tyranny Rex or Devlin Waugh out of the blue. Or maybe you’ll get a stand alone
epic such as the breathtaking Firekind,
or the breathless Leatherjack, or the
beautiful Cradlegrave. Or you’ll get Strange and Darke, a superbly scripted
opening series for a pair of characters that may never return.

Rogue Trooper: Cinnabar (that one everyone says is like the
best post-GFD story ever. And they’re right!)

Indigo Prime: Killing Time

Heavy Metal Dredd
(what can I say, I’m a gorehound)

Revere

Firekind

Devlin Waugh: the Herod epic; Innocence & Experience

Dead Eyes

Cradlegrave (This really is a masterpiece – one of a handful of 2000 AD stories that
I think could thrive beyond the realms of Tharg. It makes me shudder just
thinking about it)

Strange & Darke

Art by Cliff Robinson

More on John SmithI'm struggling to find interviews, so instead two other reviews

Here's the Slow Bullet on Indigo Prime
And Douglas Wolk on Devlin WaughGrant Goggans, the Hipster Dad himself, with his take on Indigo Prime
Steve Mace teases an interview with Class of '79 here, but the link is broken, boo hoo.

*seriously – go and
re-read Dead Eyes and Cradlegrave in a northern accent and
they come alive in new and wonderful ways. I wonder if it works for Revere, even though that’s
a specifically London-set story? You can tell I’m a dirty Souther, can’t you.

**technically a Tyranny Rex story, but it spent as much
if not more time with Fervent & Lobe, two Indigo Prime operatives.

***I’d cite this work
as a key piece of evidence that Smith is something of an opposite to his contemporaries
Mark Millar and Grant Morrison. Those two titans of comic sales are, I think,
great at the craft of telling a story and at making readers think they’re
getting an intelligent exploration of a theme – while often it’s pretty dumb (I’m
being a bit harsh on Morrison. A bit.) Smith is the real deal when it comes to
intelligent themes, but his early levels of craft where perhaps too oblique to
bring in the punters and rack up the sales…

****When you can get
Rian Hughes to draw pictures in his normal, incredibly warm but also mannered
style, and make them f*cking terrifying, you know you can write good horror. Go re-read The Eyes of Edwin Spendlove...

1 comment:

Thanks for all the kind words! Had an awful 2015, but hope to get back to proper work this year. Hit me up on Facebook, if you like? I'm on holiday in Lanzarote at the moment thinking up a new horror story! Laters!